Law Courts 249
cedrare in where over land be-
tween clergy and laymen, this later
into an independent assize.1 In article fifteen, he de-
clared that *£ pleas of due under of or
without pledge of faith are to be in the king's Justice/**
Henry was put in the wrong by the murder of
and was forced to renounce, or to renounce, what he
had claimed in the Constitutions. A chronicler
recorded this abjuration: **He swore that those cus-
toms inimical to the churches of his land which had
brought in in his time he would utterly do away with."J
Considering his former claim that these customs were all
those of his grandfather's time, this cot to
have been a very thorough renunciation.
From Henry's time, there a decline from the Consti-
tutions of Clarendon in the royal control over the trial and
punishment of criminous clerks; while in civil jurisdic-
tion, the kings not only kept in their courts what was then
claimed, but continued to draw business away from the
church courts. On the latter subject, nothing further
needs to be said here, for at an early date the civil juris-
diction of the church ceased seriously to hamper that of
the state.4 But notice must be taken of the immunity of
the clergy from lay jurisdiction, for it proved a serious
breach in the efficiency of the English government until
the Reformation. Becket was murdered in 1170 and
Henry was reconciled to the church, through his abjura-
1 See above, pp. 145, 146.
2 Cases in which the debt had been secured by an oath were being taken
by the church courts on the ground that the chinch was the guardian of
oaths. See above, p. 241, note I.
s Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi Benedicts Abbotts f i, 33.
4 ". . . still the sphere that was left to the canonists will seem to
pur eyes very ample. It comprehended not only the enforcement of eccles-
iastical discipline, and the punishment—by spiritual censure, and, in the
last resort, by excommunication—of sins left unpunished by temporal
law, but also the whole topic of marriage and divorce^ those^last dying
wills and testaments which were closely connected with dying confes-
sions, and the administration of the goods of intestates. Why to this day
do we couple l Probatef with * Divorcef? Because in the Middle Ages both
of these matters belonged to 'the courts Christian/"—Maitland and
Montague, Sketch of English Legal History, pp. 41, 42.